I've been a passionate software developer for a very long time ... now I'm a tech-savvy IT manager and tinker with things like this blog in my free time ;)
Developing software never lets you go. It's a creative passion and for me it's the web that has fascinated me for almost 30 years.
My latest stuff is below and here is more about me. Meet me @kiko@indieweb.social.
‘Le Bretagne’ (Brittany) is one of the most beautiful and historic parts of Europe and always worth a visit. It combines the sometimes rugged English flair with the art of living of France, both scenically and in the architecture and the way people live there. My wife likes all things English and I am a friend of the french ‘Savoir Vivre’, and we were able to combine the two beautifully on a trip to Saint-Malo and Jersey. It was a photographers dream…
As a visual person, I’m always thrilled when I come across small but subtle tips, tricks or even entire solutions that lift my understanding of what can be done with CSS to new heights. Of course, this month :has() is once again one of them, but also once again contributions from Bramus van Damme and Ahmad Shadeed, whose posts I read without exception because they are both so good at what they do.
Chris Coyier’s post “Open Graph Blues“ got me thinking that my blog’s metadata, which are used by Google among others to index my pages, aren’t really at the cutting edge anymore. I took the markup of the individual elements of the pages via schema.org Microdata attributes from the standard Hexo template years ago and always adjusted it by value, but never questioned that there are more modern variants to provide the metadata.
It’s Ok for Google to use Microdata attributes, but the HTML code of my templates is getting more and more opaque, because next to these stick to the tags also those for the Indieweb, classes for CSS and last but not least those for the own indexing via Pagefind. There becomes from a simple
1 | <article> |
quickly becomes a …
1 | <article class="article-type-post h-entry" |
Lots of textual overhead and the hardest part is maintaining it over the long term. Better would be a complete search engine description in the header of a page, where also the other meta information is available. In one place and not spread all over the HTML code. JSON-LD to the rescue…
UPDATE: Parts of the original post are outdated, as Pagefind DOES offer a way to preset a search string, which just hasn’t been documented yet … \o/ … see below.
A couple of days ago I wrote about my attempt to integrate Pagefind in my blog. In the meantime, I further refined the indexing by excluding more content areas and adding more for the metadata to make the search results even better.
But one thing was still missing: controlling the search via url parameters, so that you can actually consider the page as a search page. I came across this in a post about the sense and nonsense of Open Graph attributes and other search engine related metadata nowadays. Google, for example, likes to use JSON-LD and when describing the site you can define a search page which then makes it easier to search the site directly via Google … see Sitelinks search box (WebSite) structured data
In my implementation, I decided to adapt the Pagefind UI for myself instead of developing everything from scratch via JavaScript. There are always some limitations with pre-built solutions, but I want to show here that they are actually none for the inclusion of a url parameter.
In the age of streaming services, radio may seem out of date, but it still surrounds us constantly, even if we often hardly notice it - in the car, on the public transport, at work or simply at home in the kitchen. One strength of the old medium is that it presents us with music we haven’t heard before, away from our playlists on Spotify or iTunes.
The easiest way to rediscover new artists or entire genres of music is to pick a radio station at random. It’s precisely this lack of control, the being at the mercy, the sometimes unpredictable that makes the medium so appealing to many - and with digital streaming, many of the world’s stations are just a tap away.
As is so often the case in the modern world, it’s the oversupply that leaves some confused and frustrated. You first have to be able to pick out what you might like from the gigantic haystack of options. For this purpose, there are little helpers that more or less independently suggest what you might listen to. One of them stands out from the crowd because, on the one hand, it does not pursue commercial interests and, on the other hand, it approaches the station search very intuitively: Radio Garden (https://radio.garden).
From the beginning of this blog I wanted to provide some kind of full text search in order to give my users the ability to find stuff by keyword.
There are a few Hexo plugins that have approached the subject, but it was not really satisfactory and performant. So I relied on the worlds biggest search engine: Google. A search button, which drives out a small input field and with the pressing of the ENTER key the form was sent via GET to //google.com/search.
The procedure was simple, but also burdened with the fact that I always expose my users to Google. At least until now … :)
Bryce Wray set me on a new path with his post Sweeter searches with Pagefind, in which he talks about his experience with the still fairly fresh tool Pagefind…
--- Liam Bigelow @ pagefind.appPagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure …
Pardon me? A full text search for SSG’s running completely in the browser? It sounded so great that I had to try it right away. And what can I say … it not only works fantastically well, but is also extremely easy to implement. Of course, you have to consider a few things, especially with regard to the SSG Hexo I use, but I didn’t find any big hurdles, also because the tool is so well documented. Let’s see what my implementation looks like…
Every year CodePen publishes a list of the 100 most “liked” pens on their site: The Most Hearted of 2022. It’s always exciting to scroll through the list and marvel at the incredibly good work of CSS artists.
My favorite in terms of CSS coding art this year is the work A moment of pure CSS by Ben Evans. Absolutely amazing what he does with pure CSS:
From all these works you can take a lot of know-how for yourself, but many of these pens have no practical use at first, i.e. you can’t really use them directly on your own website. They are art. Some of them impressed me not only because of their creativity, but I saved them on my own Trello list to try them out in one of the next projects. Partly they are clever approaches regarding usability, partly more or less standard functions were implemented in a visually impressive way. Some of them need some JS to work, sime of them not. Let yourself be inspired …
As someone said the other day? “January is the Monday of the year”. How true. After programming myself a new workflow for creating my discoveries (see Generate Content from Trello) at the end of last year, I wanted to try it out again right away and give you a list of tips and tricks for starting 2023.
I’m collecting/bookmarking links to interesting website post on a public Trello board and aggregating them from time to time in a special post series called Discoveries, where I present 10 of them in one post on a specific topic.
Writing these summaries is currently still a bit time-consuming, because in addition to the link, the name of the author and a small description, I would also like to display a screenshot of the page in each case … and it is still a completely manual process.
After selecting the 10 links I want to talk about, I first create a new post for my Hexo blog and then process the links as follows:
I do use two tag plugins (tag-anchorlist and tag-discovery) for this in the post draft, but despite that, it’s quite time-consuming and always the same procedure that can be wonderfully automated… and here I’d like to write about how I approached this task, while I’m working on it.
Websites always have a certain purpose and depending on what you want to do with it, there are pre-designed tools, that make it very easy to get started. In this issue of Discoveries I have collected a few such enablers.
Also included are two hosting offers that address the hot topics of #Fediverse and #IndieWeb in times of #TwitterMigration.
I’ve started this blog in 2019 with this article primarily because I needed an area to record things learned for myself, with the side effect that others can benefit from it if they want.
Why my choice fell on the static site generator Hexo, I no longer know, but I have now become accustomed (even to the shortcomings) and so far I have been able to implement all my ideas in it … and I had a few of them.
In this post I would like to share a few experiences I have had with Hexo, regarding the main functionality and the things I’ve customized and describe my workflow behind the individual features of my blog. The latter is not as straightforward as I would like it to be, especially because I have different devices in use that require different approaches. The main purpose of this post is to simply write down for me, how things currently work on kiko.io and to have one or the other idea how to do it better while writing. Doing this publicly is in the hope that you might read this and have a terrific idea that I haven’t come up with yet and leave a comment or webmention … :)
This weekend I had a revival experience. I got myself a Mastodon account, after many years of staying away from social media as far as I could and at most tweeting a new blog post. Since my active Twitter days, things have taken such a turn for the worse, that I’ve preferred to stay away completely.
I don’t know what made me join Mastodon on Sunday, but it sparked something in me: The love for the good old internet of the late 90s, early 2000s. These guys gave me a warm welcome and made me feel that Internet communities, away from sleazy influencers and banner ads, could actually still work. I got a taste of it, when I let this blog become part of IndieWeb over a year ago, but didn’t quite believe in it because of the low traffic and mentions.
Now the richest man on the planet has to come along and buy the bird site, and a niche product called Mastodon, well known but underestimated in tech circles, almost explodes under the onslaught of disappointed commercial users. And that’s what we are on Twitter, Facebook and Co … a commercial object.
The problem now will be how the community can integrate these many users for whom it was not mentally prepared. What now adapts to whom? The most important thing, however, will be to teach the newcomers (and I count myself among them) that Mastodon is not Twitter in new clothes!
I was going to write a few things about this, but this morning I read a Twitter thread from Peter Jakobs, a self-proclaimed digital Aboriginal from Germany, that just sums it all up and explains it so well I could hardly do it:
That’s why I’m now doing something I’ve never done before: I quote Peter here completely, translated from German into English … Curtain up (and thank you DeepL :D):